Customize Your WordPress.com Dashboard

January 8, 2019

Courtney Burton Doker

We’re happy to announce new improvements to your WordPress.com dashboard for a more accessible and customized experience. From your desktop, you can now customize your dashboard by choosing one of our two new color schemes, Classic Bright for a fresh modern feel and Classic Blue as the standard you’ve known and loved. As part of our commitment to inclusive design, these new colors have been optimized for higher contrast and increased legibility with a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.

ColorGrayscale

We’ll soon be introducing additional color scheme options that will continue our mission of a better more accessible web for everyone.

Here’s how to customize your color scheme:

On your desktop, sign in to your WordPress.com account that you’d like to customize.

Click your account avatar in the upper right corner.

Select Account Settings

Under Dashboard Color Scheme select an option

Have ideas for color schemes you’d like to see? Please comment below.

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I don’t want to spread negativity, but both currently available themes are extremely dark. Yes, that applies to ‘Classic Bright’ too. In the dashboard, the pink highlighting the day on the stats chart barely stands out, it’s so dark, very close to the blue. The world map with traffic source doesn’t even have the pink at all, it’s just all dark greyish blue.

I’ve just logged in, in New Zealand, and was horrified to find that the colour scheme had been changed for me without my choice. The usual tan-coloured dot for notifications was a sickly pinky colour (as was the login button). When I clicked to “like” something it just went a darker blue and wasn’t clearly different at all. I don’t appreciate the interference of WP in matters that were perfectly fine as they were. Now I’ll have to go and try and get it configured back to how it was. Why couldn’t you have just left it as it was?

How is blue more contrasting to blue than the good old orange?
It’s interesting that you say the new scheme is easier on your eyes, for some reason my eyes have been hurting ever since the change, something in this colour scheme is extremely eye straining in my case.

The classic blue isn’t the same as what it was. When the colours just changed on me I thought my computer screen had glitched, then realised the scheme had changed. Saw this post and changed the setting back to Classic Blue but the colours on the map, the lack of orange bar, everything is different and honestly both schemes are harder on the eyes than what we had.

Let’s say that I don’t have any issues with the colors, bright, blue could be anything, I will get used to it. But as a fun fact I can’t see the text anymore on the Notification option, just the picture of the blogger who liked or is following my blog. And this is happening when I am in the My site. When I enter the Reader I can see also the notification text. This seems to be a bug.

Honestly, it is kind of depressing and the pink isn’t all the great… I much preferred the orange. I would be a lot happier if there was an option to go back to the old one, which was way better.
I wrote an article reviewing it too, if anyone wants to read it: https://wp.me/pa0p2b-8a

First, thanks for always trying to improve things for us. But, sometimes, the way it is works just fine. I went in to free myself from the pink— I’ve grown too accustomed to the blues and/or I’m a creature of habit— so I accessed “account settings” and clicked “classic” to revert to what some might consider the same ol’, same ol’ but what I think is just perfect. And it’s just not the same. Too dark and hurts my eyes. I like the lighter hues the way they were. And, yes, while it’s novel to scroll over any given day to see the contrasts better, I’m not convinced that the new-and-improved works better for me. So, what’s the likelihood that we’ll get back what we had before? Thanks so very much!

Here’s my honest response: The more your folks at wordpress change and upgrade, the more I feel like leaving wp. It look me some time to master the blog and the web site and I do not have patience for mastering new things every six months or every year. I get very frustrated with every new change. I am of the age that I need a person to totally walk me through every new change, a live person, on a phone or in a chat, or better yet, in the room. So when you change something else, please do not inform me of it. It just makes me nervous. I have reached the stage in life where I accept What Is.

Why do you provide this option only through the Dashboard “Settings”. When I joined WP there was no link provided under “My Sites” to the Dashboard and it took ages before I read you have to add wp-admin/ onto the end of the blog url to get the Dashboard. Under the “My Sites” Settings which I can easily access you don’t colour scheme options. There’s such a disconnect between “My Sites” and “Dashboard”.

I agree with many of the comments above concerning the new colours. The blue is dreary. When the bright pink is present, the blue appears even more drab. A colour with more life and warmth would be appreciated. That should be possible while also delivering greater contrast. Yes, improving accessibility is good, but not at the cost of colouring everything dull.

I miss the orange. Orange contrasts well with blue. I would prefer a choice between “Classic Orange and Blue” and the new “bright” scheme. The so-called “Classic Blue” hasn’t enough contrast, so is no improvement.

I want the option to revert to how it was before. To just impose this new scheme is insulting. It always was fine on my laptop. Maybe folks using WP on cellphones screens and such benefit from this, I wouldn’t know. But for me, I want the colours just how they were!

Hi Courtney My name is Deb Peisner. I now have a wix site and am no longer using my WordPress site. I am getting these continual spam type of e mails. Do I need to turn off my WordPress site due to moving my domain to my new wix site?

I applaud your desire to change, improve, innovate. I’m probably in the minority, but perhaps you could have a two-track system: one for those who thrive on change, and one for people like me who have limited time and need every second of it for substance over a frequently changing format. Do consider my/our needs. Thanks.

Now that I’ve gotten the niceties out of the way, who’s the genius behind this idea? The color scheme is a TOTAL failure. It’s too dark. And stats for today show up either in pink, or in the same color as other days. What diversity. LOL.

I’m all for changes, but at least give us the option to keep it the way things were. This is madness.

Would it be possible to also leave the option to revert back to old color scheme?

It’s great you are trying to be inclusive and make it easier for people with vision problems, but there are also people like me who have neurological issues and have trouble adjusting to any change. It takes me a long time and a lot of effort to deal with even for a small change such as color scheme.

A most welcome improvement, thank you. I definitely prefer the higher contrast, so much easier to read. The “new” blue is darker which I prefer over the “old” blue. The added pink is a nice touch. I always use the classic editor and classic Stats, Comments, etc. so don’t see the “new” color scheme except when visiting the Reader and when I log in. And, yes, please give us more color choices in the near future, green would be lovely.

The new color schemes are atrocious. Give me back the orange bars for the stats and the yellow to orange/red colors on the maps. It’s very difficult to see the gradient on the maps with that dull blue-gray tone.

I also agree with Judy L. above. Many of us bloggers are not techies and the more you screw around with the platform with the frequency with which you do it, the more inclined I am to take my five blogs/websites elsewhere. (And I’ve only dipped my toe into the whole Gutenberg blocks thing—again, making something relatively simple more complex.)

I’m all for improvement where real improvement is needed, not just for the sake of doing “something.” You can do better, WordPress.

Okay, fair point, you added a chart comparing the contrast between the new colours vs white. I agree that the contrast is better there (you made the colours darker, so it’s obvious that dark is more contrasting to white).
But, you missed the point where new colours also have to be contrasting between one another, not just white.
And I’m sorry to break it to you, but two dark colours don’t contrast at all.
GUI is supposed to highlight the important information effectively, so that it’s clear and instantly visible. With the current, plain dark colour scheme, I can’t instantly tell which day I’m on in the stats chart, I can’t instantly tell where my traffic comes from looking at the map, I can’t instantly tell if there’s a notification dot on the bell and I can’t instantly tell whether I’ve already liked a post or not. All of those things which should be intuitive and visible at first glance are now extremely eye-straining and since the change I’ve had trouble managing my site for longer than 5 minutes at a time (I had to switch to doing certain actions on my mobile app, which still has nicely contrasting colours).

Oh dear! I don’t think these changes are very good, especially given that the classic blue is nowhere near like it used to be. Like many others have said, the new colours are too dark. Brighter colours would not only stand out a lot more but would also be very eyecatching.

I know there are more colours on the way, but can we have some bright, cheerful colours, please? How about some yellows and oranges as a start. Or, how about starting by giving us back the classic blue colour, as it used to be, as an option?

I simply HATE when new changes come and I do not have the option to keep with the same good old thing that I had before. Can you please reverse that awful color scheme change and give us the option to keep the standard one, the real and true “Classic Bright”? Things have changed within the pages as well when I’m editing them. That’s really annoying.

Please can you return the colours to as they were as the default theme, then when the designers can work out how to deploy a change correctly have it as an option to change the colours (to the depressing themes they have chosen), not force it.

Even if you do change to classic blue, the stats current day is no longer highlighted orange, it is the same dark blue.

I spoke to support as i thought it was something i messed up, they accepted my concerns about the forced colour change, this was hard to read as the chat window was the horrible pink colour with white writing, but they can only tell me the designers decided to do it, and blogged about it the day they pushed out the change.

Restart your computer system when you select classic blue theme and log back in wordpress and that orange color on stat will resume, however the classic blue theme is not the default theme but is similar to it and on the contrary, the like’s color (star) remains the hideous blue color

> Courtney Burton Doker posted: ” We’re happy to announce new improvements > to your WordPress.com dashboard for a more accessible and customized > experience. From your desktop, you can now customize your dashboard by > choosing one of our two new color schemes, Classic Bright for a fresh mod” >

I find it refreshing but would like to see more options. Orange is always a good color because it represents warmth and happiness. Green, also is a good color because it represents newness and growth. Even, black, which can be stark and sexy. Those that like neutral may go for khaki and brown tones. There are a plethora of color options so offer more, please. Thank you.

I will have to study this later, but … is the new default for the “like” going to stay at blue – if I am unable to read all the new posts in Reader at one time, it is difficult to see where I left off. Sometimes I go through Reader and have time to read the short post, mostly the photographers I follow, but need more time to read lengthier posts and comment on them – I can’t see where I left off. Is this something we can manually adjust?

For those of you who don’t like this latest debacle, I am sorry to have to state this, but WordPress is not going to change things back to the old way. That train wreck that’s our stats page? It’s still ugly and when it was originally rolled out, there was plenty of negative feedback and it did not one bit of good. Save your ire. They’re not listening. They never do.

Hate it. Atrocious pink. There was nothing wrong with the previous color scheme. Why waste time on this nonsense? Also not thrilled with the new editor and have been using the mobile version to avoid it. Not my preference for writing. I rarely complain but my tolerance for the unnecessary changes is growing short.

I agree with exploribgcolour’s comment. I could never find the dashboard or anything leading to it (not for that matter to forums or support to ask them) and now find that it is hidden under the ridiculous name of WPadmin. Who realises that that is the dashboard? Please change the name under My Sites from WPadmin which is meaningless to Dashboard which you often refer to.

Add me to the list of people who preferred the old color scheme. When I post links to other posts in the Reader, the blue link is so hard to distinguish from the black that I don’t think people will notice it’s a link….and I don’t like the blue like button either. I have not tried the new editor yet, but have heard nothing but complaints about it too…..will that be forced on us too? Please, if it’s isn’t broke, don’t fix it! Not everyone has tons of time to sift through all these changes.

I hated the pink thing, so I changed it to the Whatever Blue, and it was WORSE. Also, the new editor, who works in blocks, make it much more difficult to format a single word in a paragraph. The color scheme for text and backgrounds is not particularly working. Pure black is impossible, only very, verydark gray. I feel I’m in the LEGO movie.

I find that the orange colour highlighting a selected column in the charts is better than the new ‘pinky-purple’. More options of colour schemes, as others have requested, would indeed be welcome. However, could you please change the orange text highlighting the most frequent number of views per month and the highest average views per month in tables — the bright orange here on the white background is hardly visible (perhaps red text or a yellow background coloured cell would make the record figure more noticeable).

I wanted to share an update that we were experimenting with different accent colors for the Classic Blue theme and decided to land with orange. Hopefully by now this shift should be propagated to everyone.

I noticed the change and have posted on my Exploring Colour blog about how glad I am to have an orange bar back again on the stats chart. That’s great, BUT its still not good enough that the orange colour has not yet propagated to when I hit the “Like” button on posts in Reader. It still just goes to a dark blue solid star. If I’m browsing down Reader to see what I may have missed the contrast between a blue unfilled star and a darker blue filled star is simply not enough!! Please, please attend to this as well PLEASE!!

PS. I actually like the new blue in the Classic Blue scheme. Obviously different people have different preferences for the blue therefore I’d like to see an option for “Classic Blue” and another option for “Classic Blue – Original”. So many people like the orange that I’d expect you’d retain the orange in both schemes. I’d like WP to also please re-configure “Likes” so that if I click on “Like” then the star goes orange. And also in the Traffic chart, now we have an orange “Current” bar, lets have the current day’s posts with an orange line (vertical bar) beside them. Thanks.

Thank goodness for adjusting the shades, current accents are still worse than what we used to have but better than what the first update brought.
Now bring back colours to the world map and it might actually be bearable!

Adding orange to the Classic Blue is certainly a change in the right direction. Make both the blue and the orange a bit lighter and we would be back to where we were, which was fine. But this is an improvement. Thanks for making it.

Better contrast is good but the stats map is so dull only in shades of grey and blue etc. i liked the RED to tell me where most of my readers were located. Also in Reader when I”like” a post it just goes to a darker blue. The yellow/orange would let me know what posts I had already liked. So I’m not a fan of the new design.

I prefer a mixture of med to dark gray scales with very light gray to white fonts presenting option boxes. And with bright colors for the chosen box options. The brighter colors for the chosen options would have the reverse color in fonts. Med to dark gray fonts. I can see better with the dark color option than I can with white backgrounds.

With the new scheme it is much harder to see which notifications have been read and which haven’t, seen they’re almost the same colour. It’s also harder to see which posts in the reader I have liked, whereas before it was quickly apparent.

I appreciate WP’s commitment to inclusive design. However, the new themes are harder on my eyes, not easier. It would be wonderful if we could have the option of a light theme, like the classic themes available until just a few days ago, as well as the high-contrast themes. 🙂

Regarding colors, as long as I can read them easily, I don’t care much about them. I don’t know why they needed to be changed, but I don’t notice them (except for the bright pink, which is a little much). The bar denoting visitors as opposed to views, however, seems to have disappeared from my page in wp-admin.

If a color change is made, I’d like it to be the default font color. The gray is difficult to read. Black would be a help–if not the default, at least the choice to change easily.

I do everything from the wp-admin page because it’s convenient–I can go anywhere from there. The new blocks are nice–I used it several times–but the page hides buttons and icons, requires more clicks, and has less functionality than the classic editor. I can start new paragraphs in the classic editor without needing blocks.